In So Many Words, the N.B.A. Redefined by Bill Simmons

It is nearly impossible to write about Bill Simmons’s new work, “The Book of Basketball,” without noting its heft: 697 pages, longer than his hero Bill Russell’s three memoirs (648 pages), weightier than Wilt Chamberlain’s two autobiographies (614 pages), but probably less wordy than Hubie Brown’s verbiage in any single game.

“I wanted to write a really memorable N.B.A. book, and you know, I wanted to do it once,” Simmons, the ESPN.com columnist and podcaster, said before his breakfast of eggs Benedict arrived at the Plaza Hotel during an interview last week. “I never got worried about the length. I just wanted to make sure it all tied together.”

He added, “I know it’s hard to believe in a 700-page book, but every word is chosen carefully.”

(There are also 1,032 footnotes that serve Simmons as his rimshots and his extended explanations.)

“The Book of Basketball” may be one of those literary lollapaloozas that Simmons’s fans must buy (but not all read), which is fine for Simmons. His popularity is at a level that sportswriters at dead-tree outlets and other Web sites cannot equal. His column has attracted an average of 1.4 million page views and 460,000 unique visitors a month over the past six months (according to comScore, which measures media audiences). His ESPN podcasts are downloaded two million times a month (according to internal ESPN research by Omniture).

And he has 980,000 people following his tweets. (On Monday, he tweeted to someone in Los Angeles trying to find his book: “Keep getting tweets like this. Who else in US failed to find it?”)

“The Book of Basketball” rode right to the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, and Ballantine Books/ESPN Books has nearly doubled the number of copies in print, to 163,000 from 93,000. The book’s introduction is by a writer who is a more famous brand name than Simmons: Malcolm Gladwell.

Photo

Bill Simmons, the ESPN.com columnist and podcaster, with a few of the many of newspapers he reads.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“The most fascinating thing about him,” Simmons said of Gladwell, “is he never watched games as a kid because he grew up in rural Canada, so he became a fan by reading Sports Illustrated in the library from ages 8 to 16.”

Simmons, 40, is a well-informed, snarky, porn- and gambling-loving superfan whose inspiration sprang from his father’s purchase of a Celtics season ticket in the 1970s. Simmons’s exposure to Boston Garden — like a Head Start for John Havlicek-loving tots — gave him a strong Celtics education (or a good brainwashing).

“Of the 50 greatest moments in my life, Boston Garden would be in 12 of them,” he said.

Simmons’s book is an attempt to evaluate (and re-evaluate) great players and great teams and debunk myths through the prism of rules changes, evolving body types, improved training, the rise of the black athlete, talent gluts, expansion, competition from the A.B.A., the influx of foreign players and coaching innovations.

He crunches numbers ably, with smart, sometimes outrageous and often funny results. But he is not wonky; he is informal, self-referential (mostly about threats to write sequels) and full of wild leaps and provocations.

He writes on parallel paths that may seem mutually exclusive but regularly connect. On one, he is the hoops obsessive analyzing 63 years of N.B.A. history with the scythe of a new-media star whose foundation is not in dying, old-world newspapering. On the second, he is the essayist/blogger who uses 150,000 words to make sense of a roundball/popular culture mash-up that includes Rick Barry’s toupee; Chamberlain’s selfishness; tape-delayed postseason games; the porn character Dirk Diggler from “Boogie Nights”; Elgin Baylor’s draft day sweaters; “The Shawshank Redemption” and its connection to Russell; Kevin McHale’s armpits; the need to blow up the Basketball Hall of Fame and build a new one in French Lick, Ind.; and dreadful general managers (Isiah Thomas, Billy King, Chris Wallace, Rob Babcock, et al).

The good Isiah was one reason that Simmons wrote the book to discover “the Secret” of successful basketball. Thomas and Simmons met beside a topless pool in Las Vegas; they bonded over the unselfish reasons that led the Detroit Pistons to two N.B.A. titles with Thomas as the point guard, a philosophy that is Auerbachian and Holzmanesque.

But if Thomas reads the book, he will learn that Simmons cannot forgive his post-Pistons executive failures (essentially repudiations of the Secret). “I wish Isiah Thomas be given his own reality TV show,” Simmons writes, “where he takes over businesses, stores and companies and runs them into the ground.”

What should be remembered most about the book is not necessarily his skills at evaluating players (which is compromised by his not being 85 years old and witness to games since 1946) but his excursions into race. He grasps, with seriousness and wit, what the league would have been without informal team quotas for black players; the changes in N.B.A. culture when blacks became the majority (one of them, the Detlef Syndrome, had thickly accented foreign players talking with hip-hop twangs), and the Most Valuable Player voting for undeserving whites that proved to him that in 1963, the N.B.A. logo “should have had a Ku Klux Klan hood on it.”

He said, in the interview: “Race is ingrained in everything that’s happened through N.B.A. history.”

E-mail: sandor@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on November 10, 2009, on page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: In So Many Words, The N.B.A. Defined By a Star Journalist. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe